Africa…why bother?

As the President of Jewish World Watch, I encounter one question, again and again: why do you bother? The question can creep up slowly in conversation. Someone will remark, “Well, is there anything we can really do to help those suffering in Africa? Aren’t you just proposing band aids, not solutions?” Others convey the sentiment more bluntly. With a wave of a hand they will say, “Oh…Africa…What do you expect? It will never change. We should not get involved in that mess over there. ”

Africa has no shortage of sad or bad news that drives this sense of exasperation. This month, a terrorist group in Nigeria kidnapped 200 young girls to be sold for $12 a piece as brides. In the Central African Republic, hundreds have been killed and two million people are in desperate need of immediate humanitarian assistance. In South Sudan, thousands of civilians have been murdered and millions have been displaced in a new round of violence. Militias continue to rape women, enslave children, and murder hundreds in Congo.  And a campaign of ethnic cleansing continues to plague Darfur. 

What we can do? After many trips to Africa, and ten years of working on these issues nearly every day, I can say with confidence – quite a bit!

I’ve seen firsthand so many remarkable projects and advocacy efforts that truly change lives and transform whole regions.

Jewish World Watch’s “>companies such as Intel to develop conflict-free products, depriving warlords of the blood money that they need to murder.

I am about to leave on my ninth trip to Africa with Jewish World Watch. We will meet with Congolese men who are working to change the social norms that blame the rape victim and excuse the rapist. We will visit street children and orphans. We will meet the victims of rape and violence, and the liberated child soldiers who were forced to kill.

These people are the reason that we bother. We bother because those being killed, raped, and kidnapped are human beings who deserve our attention. We bother because they matter, just as our relatives in Europe should have mattered to the rest of the world. We bother because we are human, because we are Jews, because if saving lives is a bother, then what kind of partners are we with God in this world? We bother, because as our scripture says,  “If we save one life it is as though we saved the entire world.”

Janice Kamenir-Reznik is the Co-founder and President of Jewish World Watch.